For the past many years as a contractor and several missions where I could help Organisations assess, diagnose, audit and evaluate their virtual infrastructures and cloud initiatives I stumbled upon the fact that many of them just lack a strategic planning process. Eventually those who actually have gone through the process, or kind of, often ‘forgot’ to communicate the outcome to the rest of the Organisation or ‘forgot’ to regularly update it. Seriously!

Let’s (re-)define what actually is a Strategic Planning Process.

Simply put, it’s about groups of people, coming most of the time within the Organisation, deciding together what they want to accomplish, aka the Vision, and how they are going to get there, aka the Action Plan.

VMOSA is a practical planning process that can be used by any Organisation. It is a comprehensive planning tool to help an Organisation by providing a blueprint for moving from dreams to actions.

Let’s briefly define and characterise each individual part.

The VISION (The Dream)

The Vision communicates what the organisation believes where they want to be in the near future, often within the 3 to 5 years. There are certain characteristics that a Vision statement should have:

Future focused

Challenging

Inspiring

Relevant

Concise

The MISSION (The What and the Why)

Developing Mission statements are the next step in the strategic planning process. An organisation’s Mission statement describes what the organisation is doing and why it’s doing that. There are certain characteristics that a Mission statement should have:

Purpose oriented

Broadly

Concise

The OBJECTIVES (How Much Of What Will Be Accomplished By When)

The next step is to develop the specific Objectives that are focused on achieving the Mission statement. An objective is derived from the goal, has the same intention as a goal, but it is more specific, quantifiable and verifiable than the goal. Remember that an Objective must start with the word “To”. An organisation’s Objectives generally lay out how much of what will be accomplished by when.

There are five basic characteristics to an objective that are called SMART:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Realistic

Timed

STRATEGIES (The How)

The next step in the process of VMOSA is developing your Strategies. Strategies explain how the organisation will reach its objectives.

There are basically three major steps in this process:

Collect information, internally and externally, to figure out where the organisation is now.

Synthesise it into a SWOT table.

Refresh and update your Vision to make still relevant and clear.

There are four key questions you need to answer within your strategy planning session:

Who’s the strategy manager?

How to communicate the strategy?

Who’s accountable for the strategy?

How often the strategy status is updated?

ACTION PLAN (What Change Will Happen, Who Will Do What By When)

Finally, an organisation’s action plan describes in great detail exactly how strategies will be implemented, within the wide strategy boundaries, to accomplish the objectives developed earlier in this process.

Action steps are developed for each component of the intervention or changes to be sought. These include:

Action step(s): What will happen

Person(s) responsible: Who will do what

Date to be completed: Timing of each action step

Resources required: Resources and support (both what is needed and what’s available )

Barriers or resistance, and a plan to overcome them!

Collaborators: Who else should know about this action

A good tip would be to regularly come together and talk about the plan and get updates. Eventually you will make adjustments and adaptations to the plan according to the feedback from the people who are responsible. Your action plan will need to be tried and tested and revised, then tried and tested and revised again.

IN SUMMARY

VMOSA is a great tool to help organisations with their strategic planning process. Establishing a strategic planning is a never ending process. But at the end of the day it is a worthless process if organisations don’t communicate the outcome to their staff and ensure all stakeholders have understood it.

I have witnessed private cloud projects going belly up many times and by that I meant that these projects did not address the primary goals the sponsors set. Not that the goals were impossible or unachievable or maybe too exotic. Not at all! Actually the goals are the same for many organisations investing in private cloud projects. And by the way here are my top 3 goals organisations are looking at primarily when they decide to go private cloud:

Cut down cost

Better quality of service

Increase Business agility

So how comes organisations can’t address these simple goals? Where do they fail? Here are my 5 failure patterns:

Managing-by-magazine. No strategic plans.

Understanding your own requirements. No business case, migrate vs. innovate.

Lack of a holistic architectural discipline. Cloud will not save you from a good architecture design buddy.

Now I tell you a secret. For a successful cloud project here is the recipe:

Adapt your business processes.

Simplify your IT processes.

Buy-in of key stakeholders.

Get the Experts in at the inception of the project.

And remember that Cloud Computing is much more than a technology from VMware, OpenStack or Microsoft. Cloud Computing is business opportunity to achieve cost reduction, better quality of service and increase Business agility.

Back to the title and the importance of the non-functional requirements. Let me illustrate this statement with the following short story and a picture. As you know a picture is worth a thousand words.

Once upon a time, there was this proud Hummer owner. After wearing out his tires he wanted a new set of wheels for his monster 4×4 truck. He got the nearest garage and requested four wheels, nothing more but nothing less. Illico presto the garage front desk clerk sold the guy four wheels and got them mounted on the SUV… And voila!

Good laugh isn’t it 🙂

Did the garage front desk clerk sell the appropriate wheels… Well probably YES he did!

Beyond the fun and the buzz, we cannot imagine this truck winning the Dakar Rally with such wheels, can we!?

That’s where the importance of the non-functional requirements come in the picture.

A non-functional requirement states HOW a functional requirement should behave on top on what the function should do.

Additionally non-functional requirements help you to measure the quality of the function.

If only either the garage front desk clerk or the Hummer owner have defined the non-functional requirements we probably wouldn’t have these wooden wheels mounted on the SUV (and we wouldn’t have this funny picture either).

Many times I’ve seen and reviewed architecture design documentations where only functional requirements were defined. Such designs have a common behaviour… They used to fail to address the overall objectives of the project.

During my time at Bull I had the opportunity to setup a Lunch&Learn program. For those who don’t know what it is, briefly it is a training event during lunch time. Usually the employer offers a free complimentary lunch.

The program had a huge positive impact and highly appreciated by the employees at Bull, with packed room for most of the topics … maybe because of the free lunch 🙂 OK guys, just kidding here.

The format of a Lunch&Learn program do not allow you to deep dive a topic but really to set the basics, get a good grasp on the concepts and the terminology.

And that’s the trigger of this post.

You would be surprised how much, Cloud Computing for instance, is misunderstood by the people. Adding to that the misuse of the term in many marketing materials, white papers articles, blog posts, etc.

The big issue with this kind of situation is when we need to sit down and discuss a project, well each one has his own definition, terminology and conceptual view of the matter. Every one has his own opinion, more or less pertinent, but there is no consensus to move forward. How many of you had endless meetings just to agree about what is or is not a specific topic such Cloud Computing.

That’s why it is important to get back to the basics and eventually start any project by (re-)defining the baseline, the basics, so we speak all the same language and share the same concepts and terminology. No mis-interpretation, mis-understanding, no mis-communication, no mis-perception, no mis-xxx for the good of the project…

I would like to hear from you. Do you do such thing as set the basics prior starting a project? How do you deal with the mis-xxx? Do you define concepts and terminology within your architecture documentation for instance?

[UPDATE]
Looks like the same issue shows up with Intel® Gigabit Ethernet Controllers such the i350-T4. And the same fix is to be applied…
[/UPDATE]

It’s been a long time I haven’t published anything on me blog site. As you may know I’ve been working for Bull for the last 21 months.

During that time I could familiarised with the awesomeness of Bull’s bullion server. A modular 4-socket x86 server that scales up up to 16-socket by stacking 4 modules.

For connectivity Bull certified state-of-the-art Intel® 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller. However recently I came across a strange issue with some of those bullion servers. All of the sudden they would lost network connectivity. Starting with one port, then eventually both ports of a dual-port Intel® 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller. The very specific symptom in this case is that the port would failed but would remain up in vSphere, while no traffic would go through. Also the Observed IP Ranges would show ‘none’ instead of the usual range of IP addresses. The basic troubleshooting steps and error codes would reveal a PCIe bandwidth issue to the CPU huh!?

Basically Intel® 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller are just not compatible with this function and I would bet none of the other server grade 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controllers are neither compatible with this function. Who would want his PCIe card being put down to save on power on production server!

So to resolve this issue, disable ASPM on the BIOS/EFI configuration of the server. When ASPM is disabled, PCIe adapters without ASPM support operate normally.

Dee-No

DINO the future of vSphere NUMA scheduler uh!
First thing first, DINO is not Dino… Dino is one of the The Flintstones’s fictional characters.
Flintstones. Meet the Flintstones. They’re the modern stone age family.
From the town of Bedrock, They’re a page right out of history…yabba dabba doo time!
All right, all right. DINO is not Dino. So what is DINO? I leave this for later.
For now let’s focus on NUMA design and vSphere NUMA Scheduler.

So what is NUMA?

Wikipediasays: “Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessing, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to a processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory, that is, memory local to another processor or memory shared between processors. NUMA architectures logically follow in scaling from symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architectures”

NUMA is often contrasted with Uniform Memory Access (UMA) which is a shared memory architecture used in parallel computers. All the processors in the UMA model share the physical memory uniformly. In a UMA architecture, access time to a memory location is independent of which processor makes the request or which memory chip contains the transferred data. Read more at Wikipedia.

Figure 1 shows a classic SMP system where there is usually a single pool of memory also referred as an Uniform Memory Access (UMA). That is memory access is equal for all processors. Contention-aware algorithms works well here.

Figure 1 : SMP system – Uniform Memory Access (UMA)

The main drawback of the UMA architecture is that it doesn’t follow in scaling from symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architectures where many processors must compete for bandwidth on the same system bus. That’s why server vendors added NUMA design on top of SMP design. The first commercial implementation of a NUMA-based Unix system was the Symmetrical Multi Processing XPS-100 family of servers, designed by Dan Gielan of VAST Corporation for Honeywell Information Systems Italy (HISI). In 1991 Honeywell’s computer division was sold to Groupe Bull. How interesting is that!

Figure 2 shows a classic SMP system with Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). In a DSM system there are multiple pools of memory and the latency to access memory depends on the relative position of the processor and memory. This is also referred to a Non-Uniform Memory Access or NUMA.

Major benefit; each processor has local memory with the lowest latency. On the opposite remote memory access is slower. Intel says that latency can go up to 70% and bandwidth as less than half of local access bandwidth.
But the biggest downside of DSM is that it only works well if the operating system is “NUMA-aware” and can efficiently place memory and processes. The OS scheduler and memory allocator play a critical role here.

vSphere is NUMA aware as long as the BIOS reports it. That is as long as the BIOS builds a System Resource Allocation Table (SRAT), so the ESX/ESXi host detects the system as NUMA and applies NUMA optimizations. If you enable node interleaving (also known as interleaved memory), the BIOS does not build an SRAT, so the ESX/ESXi host does not detect the system as NUMA. Does that mean that vSphere doesn’t do any optimization if you haven’t enabled NUMA in the BIOS? I guess it doesn’t since the scheduler doesn’t know the relationship between processor and local memory. That information is only given by the SRAT as I understand it.

What are vSphere NUMA optimizations I’m referring to?

Before we deep dive vSphere NUMA optimizations, first let’s define a Home Node. A Home Node is one of the system’s NUMA nodes containing processors and local memory, as indicated by the System Resource Allocation Table (SRAT).

They are two main vSphere NUMA optimization algorithms and settings you find in the vSphere NUMA Scheduler:

Home Nodes and Initial Placement. When a virtual machine is powered on, ESX/ESXi assigns it a home node in a round robin fashion. To work around imbalanced systems when virtual machines are stopped or become idle, there is a second set of algorithms and settings called,

Dynamic Load Balancing and Page Migration. ESX/ESXi combines the traditional initial placement approach with a dynamic rebalancing algorithm. Periodically (every two seconds by default), the system examines the loads of the various nodes and determines if it should rebalance the load by moving a virtual machine from one node to another. This calculation takes into account:

To get a detailed description of the algorithms and settings used by ESX/ESXi to maximize application performance while still maintaining resource guarantees, visit vmware.com.

vSphere NUMA Scheduler has put in place pretty smart algorithms and settings when it comes to initial placement and memory management. I was wondering could it be better?
For instance, by managing contention for shared resources that occurs when memory-intensive threads are co-scheduled on cores that share parts of the memory hierarchy, such as last-level caches and memory controllers.

Meet DINO

Sergey Blagodurov from Simon, Sergey Zhuravlev, Mohammad Dashti and Alexandra Fedorova, all from Simon Fraser University, have published a very interesting technical paper at Usenix.org about limitation of current NUMA design and a proposition of a new approach they called DINO which stands for Distributed Intensity NUMA Online.

Those guys have discovered that state-of-the-art contention management algorithms fail to be effective on NUMA systems and may even hurt performance relative to a default OS scheduler.

Contention-aware algorithms focused primarily on UMA (Uniform Memory Access) systems, where there are multiple shared last-level caches (LLC), but only a single memory node equipped with the single memory controller, and memory can be accessed with the same latency from any core.

Remember that unlike on UMA systems, thread migrations are not cheap on NUMA systems because you also have to move the memory of the thread. So their approach to the problem is a mechanism that ensure that superfluous thread, those that are not likely to reduce contention, are not migrated in a NUMA system.

Existing contention aware algorithms perform NUMA-agnostic migration, and so a thread may end up running on a node remote from its memory. Actual vSphere NUMA scheduler is mitigating this issue by detecting when most of a VM’s memory is in a remote node and eventually load balancing and migrating memory as long as it doesn’t cause CPU contention to occur in that NUMA node.

Could DINO Be The Future Of vSphere NUMA Scheduler?

DINO organizes threads into broad classes according to their miss rates, and to perform migrations only when threads change their class, while trying to preserve thread-core affinities whenever possible. VMware vSphere NUMA optimizations would benefit from this by adding DINO approach to the existing optimization code by eventually migrate memory based on threads and their miss rates as well.

In vSphere 5.x VMware introduced vNUMA. It presents the physical NUMA typology to the guest operating system. vNUMA is enabled by default on VMs greater than 8 way but you can change this by modifying the numa.vcpu.min setting. Is this an attempt to hand over the critical NUMA scheduler job to the guest OS hoping it does a better job? I would say that it may seems a good approach but at the cost of losing control. In a shared environment such a VMware environment, the virtual machine monitor should be in control, always.

Eggnog

I’m not within the secret of Gods. I don’t have access to VMware developers and codes. Thus what I’m being saying here is based on a series of elements, readings, articles, vendor architecture documents that I have compiled and read through while preparing Santa Christmas Eve with an enhanced version of eggnog in my mug. Therefore I may be wrong, off-target, totally inaccurate in my conclusion…

If you have another point of view, piece of information I don’t have. If I missed something in my thought process just post a comment. I’ll be very happy to read from you!

Dear Santa, I’ve been terrific at virtualising low hanging fruit over the past years. I have reduced costs while increasing availability, reliability and performance for my applications. I’m a prodigy, I’m a super-hero!

Now my CIO asked me to realize the same wonder with our business mission-critical applications!

Those applications are massive man! They require a lot of resources and they need mainframe-style availability and performance.

Only monster vm’s can cope with the load and I need even bigger monster servers to hold them up!

DISCLAIMER

Views expressed here are mine, they are not read or approved in advance by any company and don’t reflect the views of my employer, my employer’s business partners, or clients. I am solely responsible for all content produced here. No information provided here was reviewed by or endorsed by my employer or any other vendor or organization. This is my own blog. Comments are moderated!